Chou Yu-Cheng

The solo exhibition of Chou Yu-Cheng, “1 Manager with 3 Artists + 3 Companies”, features 6 projects between 2010 and 2014, in which the Taipei-based conceptual artist positions himself as an intermediary (or a “manager”), who mediates and negotiates among different individuals, institutions, companies, etc. Chou has been interested in the functioning and the functioning of the art system. Instead of creating artworks of exhibition, he aims at triggering an alternative type

of resources flow in the economy of art, one that is more fluid, multi-directional, and mutually beneficial, through the strategies of what he coins as “tricks of design”. Thus in the three projects involving companies (TOA Lighting, Rainbow Paint and TEMCO), the role of the artist consists in going between a corporation and a museum, convincing the former to become the sponsor and the latter to accept the sponsored manufactured products (fifty T5 fluorescent lamps, the paint) as the sole content of the exhibition. In the more recent works, Chou has furthered to mediate the life experiences of three “artists” (Geoff Molyneux, Yan Yi-Cheng and Lu Chieh-te) appropriates and re-interprets their works in his unique way. Through conducting interviews with these unknown people on their life courses, Chou contributes to put the spotlight on them, and to safeguard the history and memories of an older generation. His personal engagement and close collaboration with the “authors” whose works he appropriates also gives a new turn to the “postmodern” questioning of appropriation, reproduction, copyright and so on.